Teaching with technology: A large-scale, international, and multilevel study of the roles of teacher and school characteristics

Abstract

Providing high-quality instruction with technology has become more important than ever before. However, the instructional practices and the degree to which key skills, such as digital literacy and computational thinking, are emphasized in classrooms vary considerably between teachers, schools, and countries. The present study was aimed at explaining this variation in the frequency of teaching practices with technology and teachers' emphasis on developing students' computer and information literacy and computational thinking by key aspects of teacher motivation and expertise, school conditions and priorities, and countries' economy and innovation. Utilizing large-scale, representative data from the International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) 2018 (15,015 teachers in 1195 schools in eight countries), we performed multilevel structural equation modeling and regression trees and found that teacher motivation and collaboration were positively and consistently linked to teaching practices across countries. Besides, principals' expectations concerning the teaching with technology explained variation in Finnish and German schools. In three countries, teachers' professional development was related to their teaching practices. Finally, countries’ economic development and innovation explained variation in the teacher-level effects. Our study sheds new light on the possible factors related to teaching with technology and advances the field by taking a multilevel and international perspective on these factors.